• 17Apr 13

  iOS game recommendations

  Sorry for not visiting some of your blogs lately -- I am trying to stay as far away from Bioshock spoilers as possible. I can't get the game for a while so hopefully I can stay clear.

  Anyway, to my surprise I received an iPad 4 as a gift from moms a short time ago. My mother is retired and I think is spending her retirement funds too quickly. I have never had iPad, iPod, or iPhone, so everything is new to me with it. Not surprisingly, it is on its way to becoming another gaming platform for me. That's not what the gift giver had in mind, I'm sure, but oh well.

  Anyone have any game recommendations? Or other recommendations of stuff I should get? There's more stuff than I thought on here, although I imagine much of it isn't too good. I am trying some of the stuff I heard about but never played, like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, and I downloaded XBox Smart Glass and am still trying to figure out what the point of it is. But other than that I have no idea, so I am looking for suggestions

  (Edit -- Since writing this I bought my first iPad game: Ridiculous Fishing. When I discovered that there was a game called Ridiculous Fishing where you pulled fish out of the water and then shot them with machine guns, I had to get it. It is very fun and addicting and well worth $2.99   I will have to find more. )

  • Posted Apr 17, 2013 3:38 pm GMT
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 1Mar 13

  What are your plans for the next generation?

  It'll be the holidays before you know it, which this year means the release of two next generation consoles -- the Playstation 4 and the XBox whatever it will be called.

  There doesn't seem to be a great deal of excitement surrounding these releases though, at least not from what I've seen. There could be many reasons for that -- maybe the technological advances aren't big enough to justify the price, maybe more and more people are finally getting sick of the same old thing, maybe more and more people are discovering that PC and/or portable devices are all they need to get a gaming fix, maybe people have grown weary of the gaming industry, or maybe (like in my case) it's some or all of those things along with other things I haven't mentioned.

  I was a PS2/GameCube/XBox owner and part-time PC player two generations ago, and I was a PS3/360/Wii and part-time PC player during the most recent generation. When Wii, 360, and PS3 hit, I was still very happy with the PS2/GameCube/XBox combo and wasn't really ready to give it up, but eventually I knew I'd want all three consoles because I was always someone who was afraid to miss out on a good game, wanting to play every good exclusive that came down the pike.

  I don't feel that way this time around. I've gone from being a Nintendo-first gamer back in the GameCube days to now not being sure I'll ever own a Wii U at all. I went from XBox being my least-played console to 360 being the most-played to the point where I don't know if I want to own anything else. My PS3 I mostly use for watching blu-rays these days. Meanwhile, I still dabble in PC from time to time although PC gaming isn't nearly as fun for someone with a bad back, bad neck, and bad hands like me, so I don't play it as much as I'd like. As for exclusives, I'm not sure there are as many anymore to justify owning all three consoles, not to mention I'm not I care as much about missing out on them.

  But I don't know... maybe three years from now I will find myself once again with all three. I definitely don't plan on being an early adopter, probably waiting at least a year before considering any new console. Maybe that gap will get me hungry for the new ones. But I'm also very much considering going to the PC more as sticking to things like Steam Sales would be good for my increasingly small wallet.

  What are your plans? Are you excited about next gen? Don't care? Somewhere in between? Are you going to buy on day one, or are you going to wait a year or two before making the flip?

  ---

  It's taken until March 1 to start to dig into my 360 backlog that I built up on Black Friday (and added to the other day by buying games I'm not sure I actually wanted from the current 360 sale just because they were cheap, like El Shaddai), but it's finally time. I decided to play Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story on Wii before getting into the 360 stack. I had no idea I would sink over 150 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles though, so it's taken longer to get her than I thought.

  
  Xenoblade's stunning Eryth Sea zone was worth the price of admission.

  Xenoblade Chronicles received lots of love from game reviewers as well as the gaming community, but I can't say I was ever in love with it despite spending that much time with it. It was great in a couple areas -- some of the zones were wonderful, and the soundtrack stood out as well. But I felt that the story, characters and combat system stayed in the range of average-to-above average for most of the game, while a large percentage of the extreme quantity side quests (of which probably took up over half my playtime) too often felt meaningless and grindy. But it did have that classic JRPG feel and did a fine job of filling a JRPG void that has been missing on consoles for much of this generation.

  The Last Story was brought to us by the same person who created the Final Fantasy series (Hironobu Sakaguchi), so it's not too much of a surprise that it felt at times more like a traditional Final Fantasy game than any game in the series since Final Fantasy X. It was pretty experimental (and hit-and-miss) in terms of its combat, so that won't remind you at all of Final Fantasy, but some of the game's more romantic and grandiose moments definitely had that epic Final Fantasy feel to them. The game is unfortunately held back by technical issues and lack of polish, among other things, but I think I actually wound up having more fun with this game than Xenoblade even though I scored it a little lower. I liked the setting and characters, and it had a silly sense of humor too. It was pretty short for an RPG; I ended up with about 39 hours played and probably could have cut that by at least 15 if I had stuck to the main story. It did feel a little thin in that area, but not so much that you feel slighted.

  
  There's a great game somewhere inside The Last Story, but it didn't always find its way out.

  I also have to a bit at the Japanese perv factor at work as each game had a way by design to strip all your characters down to their undergarments while still maintaining armor value. So if you ever want to play a game where you can defeat giant bosses while your characters are in their underwear, this is the place to look.

  Anyway, those are probably two of the last games I'll play on Wii. I still will probably play Skyward Sword and maybe Kirby's Epic Yarn, but after that it will probably be time to retire the Wii for good. It was nice to spend some time with it after only having played one game on it (DKC Returns) in like two years. It made me feel like I got more of my money's worth than I originally thought.

  Well that's all for now; thanks for reading

  • Posted Mar 1, 2013 10:41 am GMT
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 10Feb 13

  It's OK to complain

  I'm reading some of the comments in this Dead Space 3 article on GameSpot, and I suppose it was inevitable that eventually I come to something like this:

  "So many entitled gamers these days, crying and butthurt because someone made a game that isn't what they wanted it to be... Its easy to tear apart someone elses creation from the anonimity of the internet... People just like to complain these days, nothing is ever good enough for them, or is as good as it once was..."

  Complaining about complaining seems to be a common phenomenon in the gaming community from what I've seen. I first really noticed it en masse during the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, and now it seems to be a matter of time before I see it come up whenever there's a complaint about something else.

  According to these people, we're apparently not supposed to complain about anything at all. Don't like the ending to Mass Effect 3? Don't like the fact that Skyrim was buggy and didn't work properly for PS3? Don't like Dead Space 3 becoming an action game? If you answered yes to any of these, or complain about anything else pertaining to a game a game, that makes you "entitled" according to these people (their favorite buzzword). I've seen some of them say that complainers just need to shut up and be thankful that these wonderful, wonderful games exist.

  I don't really frequent other online communities too much outside of sports, but from a glance it seems like this is unique to the gaming community. Some people didn't like Skyfall or The Hobbit very much, but I never saw anyone respond to those people with "You're entitled." With games though, apparently we're supposed to shut up and accept it if we don't like something. Even if someone paid for a game and it didn't work (as was the case for some with Skyrim), we're supposed to get nothing and like it.

  I don't understand that. Complaints come with anything that is released for public consumption and is part of being a customer, and any business worth their salt values constructive complaints and WANTS to hear them because they can use it to make their products better. And for people like the person above who hate it when someone "tears apart someone's creation," criticism is part of the creative process; music gets criticized, movies get criticized, books get criticized, paintings and sculptures get criticized. I'm not sure why video games should be exempt from this.

  (Not to mention that a lot of video games aren't exactly the work of an auteur... I'm guessing the creative direction of games like Dead Space 3 is at least partially controlled by guys in suits whose primary concern is maximizing profit rather than making an artistic statement or keeping artistic integrity... the article in question backs that guess up)

  Anyway, keep complaining, complainers. Sure, listening to people complain can get annoying at times, but I don't want to live in a world without you. That goes double for video games -- I can't imagine what some games might turn out like if they weren't subject to the wrath of the community and we were just supposed to accept whatever form they were released in. Don't let the people calling you "entitled" or responding to you with "First World Problems" get in your way. Whether you paid for it or not, you aren't wrong in letting your voice be heard, and who knows -- maybe your feedback can help make that game and/or future games better.

  ---

  That rant was my first entry here in a while, but I haven't had much to say. When I've been playing games it's been Xenoblade Chronicles, which has unexpectedly turned into a 100-hour game for me, and that's strange because I am not sure I really am in love with the game. But the completionist in me has taken over with this game as some unseen force is pushing me to complete every meaningless and tedious side quest (and there are a LOT of them in this game), unlock every hidden door, and level up until I complete all the skill trees and kill every uber optional boss that I find. I'm not sure how much longer I'll go at it with this game, but right now I'm on a mission to kill all the high-level monsters that killed me when I was a low-level.

  That's all for now; thanks for reading

  • Posted Feb 10, 2013 4:10 pm GMT
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg

See Previous Blog Posts »